Monday, July 20, 2009

My concern is, so what? Just because a project fell short of what was envisioned, blew the timeline, or damaged the team, does that mean it wasn't successful?

My answer to that, is, no, it doesn't mean that at all. But only along the same lines as: If you smoke a pack of cigarettes today, does that mean it's going to kill you? No, it probably won't. You'll likely live, but, you'll also likely smoke another pack tomorrow, and the next day, and then the answer changes.

Now, as if it wasn't bad enough that I equated large development projects to smoking cigarettes, I'm going to quote DeMarco and Lister, who I think she feels are icons of an unattainable utopian relationship between management/organizations and the folks in the trenches (but I don't want to put words in her mouth, you should ask her yourself).

Historians long ago formed an abstraction about different theories of value: The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people's backs. Then there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. So the English had an Industrial Revolution, while the Spanish spun their wheels trying to exploit the land and the Indians in the New World. They moved huge quantities of gold across the ocean, and all they got for their effort was enormous inflation (too much gold money chasing too few usable goods).

Value in software comes from having a great understanding of the domain and the gap that the software is trying to fill, and coming up with innovative and smart solutions to fill that gap. Innovations and smart solutions don't come from people who are constantly working overtime, or constantly feeling defeated because of another missed timeline or unrealized feature.

But value in software is hard to gauge, especially when something of lower value can sell really well in the immediate future. Some businesses are great at selling products that are of lower value. But without value, any success will always be fleeting.